Headscratchers / Cats Don't Dance

• Why didn't Mammoth just film Wooly once for their Vanity Plate? Though, Doylistly speaking, it's explained by Rule of Funny.
  • It's implied the higher-ups aren't very bright, as they've somehow never picked up on what a bitch Darla is despite the lower stagehands and makeup artists, even the human ones, clearly recognizing her maliciousness.
• If the film takes place in 1939, how did the animals live long enough to star in (at the time) recent movies like Grumpy Old Men and Twister? Especially Cranston, Frances, and Woolly, who are already pretty far along in years.
  • This can become Fridge Brilliance if you remember that this movie shows the acting minority becoming accepted much sooner than real-life minority actors were. This could conceivably have led to cinematography moving faster than in our world, and thus to the counterparts of some movies being made much sooner.
  • Out of universe, it's because the studio was so broke by the end of production that they could barely afford to animate the end credits in color. They wanted to use a wider assortment of classic film posters, but they were stuck trying to save money by only using those that they already owned and thus didn't have to buy rights to.
• Okay, so Danny ruins the Little Boat on the Sea number by over-embellishing his simple "meow" line. Darla calls for Max, who says "How does the kitty cat go?" to Danny...except Max wasn't even in the building to see the ruined take. Darla just angrily points at Danny when Max arrives, so Max would have had no idea what Danny did wrong; he asks his question as if he saw the whole thing.
  • Two things
    • 1) Max, as Darla's butler, would be a good person to practice with for her lines and as such would probably know a good portion of the script.
    • 2) Racism, or speciesism in this case. Danny's line for any movie would probably be some variation of "meow."
  • This troper always interpreted this line as Max putting Danny "in his place." Max walks in and sees the production upset, with Darla pointing to an animal extra who is off his mark. Any number of things could have happened, but certainly the offender wasn't behaving as he was supposed to, so Max reminds him that all he's there to do is look cute and say meow. "How does the kitty cat go?" didn't mean "Say your lines right," it meant "You are here to do nothing but say one word, and don't you forget it."
• In a world of Talking Animals, where would the traditional animal sounds come from? In fact, from what we can tell, the animals only act animalistic when they're acting. Are there regular animals alongside the intelligent ones?
  • Maybe it's their version of baby talk? A puppy barks before they can speak, and kittens can "mew" from birth, but words come later. Human speech is thought to have evolved from baby talk, after all—that's why so many cultures have some variant of "Mama" as their word for "mother," because babies started saying "Ma ma ma" and their mothers responded so it stuck. Maybe animals just evolved sapience later than humans, so the first human contact with them was with cows that said "moo" and pigs that said "oink."
• A minor complaint about this universe's setting: This movie takes place in 1939. In real life, that was a full two decades after Felix the Cat was featured in his first cartoon, or eleven years after Mickey Mouse starred in Steamboat Willie. I bring this up because both Felix and Mickey were Funny Animal characters who dominated pop culture throughout the 1920's and 1930's respectively—in ways that make this movie feel exceptionally ignorant of their films! If Cats Don't Dance were real, the Funny Animals characters wouldn't be pigeonholed into stereotypical roles like minority actors were in real life; they'd be treated just as well as human actors, if not better!
  • Do Felix and Mickey exist in this movie's world? If so, did the setting's Fantastic Racism prevent them from becoming stars?
  • Those are animated cartoons. While the movie is animated, the characters in-universe are not. While I won't guess what the rest of the country is like for Danny, Sawyer, and the others, the assumption of Hollywood in the film is that animals either couldn't put on a worthwhile enough performance or simply wouldn't attract enough interest to be the focus of a feature-length film. A cartoon like 'Steamboat Willie'' would do nothing to disprove such an assumption since there would be no actors involved, only drawings.
• Where are Darla's parents?
  • Is she really too young to be living without them or does she just look that young?

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